Twenty years ago, a group of freelance illustrators sick of Marvel and DC’s comics duopoly launched their own creator-friendly upstart. Today, Image Comics is a juggernaut publisher that has forever changed the game for comics, as well as the film and TV adaptations built upon pulp bones.

“[Image] co-founder Rob Liefeld said that the story of Image Comics is The Social Network of comics, and that’s a pretty apt comparison,” director Patrick Meaney, whose comics documentary The Image Revolution previews Thursday night at Comic-Con International, told Wired. “It’s a classic underdog story, full of ups and downs and great personalities. Image hasn’t always fully inhabited the principles of creator freedom, rights and respect that it was founded upon, but its rise puts comics far ahead of film and music in terms of those rights.”

“I have said over and over and over, and I will continue to say it to this day, that the writers cannot duplicate and replicate what we did,” says McFarlane. “Because the writers are incapable of doing one thing that we did: Stop writing for fucking Marvel and DC, and you will succeed.”

Fueled by bloodthirsty rampages and spectacular action in place of deep plots and thoughts, Image Comics’ superheroes were often indistinguishable from their nemeses. The publisher’s bracing impact on the rejuvenated comics industry of the ’90s led to impressive sales and paved the way for independent publishers like Dark Horse and IDW, who have since made their names in a more diversified comics game.

“The inmates were really running the asylum at that point, and that worked for us.”

Image’s conscientious, creator-oriented ethic set McFarlane, Liefeld and crew apart from Marvel and DC’s industry stranglehold, despite Image’s later missteps. “The inmates were really running the asylum at that point, and that worked for us,” says Marc Silvestri in the clip above. The publisher’s bold bid for independence still resonates today.

“Since we pitched the idea to Image Comics, creator rights has become a larger conversation in comics,” said Meaney, whose engrossing previous comics documentaries Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods and Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts treated their creators like the cultural influentials that the mainstream is just beginning to realize they are.

“From The Avengers‘ Jack Kirby situation and the Before Watchmen controversy to the increasing creator exodus from Marvel and DC, this is the perfect time to look back at Image’s founding,” he said. “And Image is increasingly becoming the place to go for good comics. I’m reading more Image books than ever, and there’s more buzz around their output than any time in the last 15 years.”

Newer Image titles like Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, now an acclaimed television series, are turning heads. But even older titles like Lee’s Stormwatch — which originated at Image before leaping to his Wildstorm imprint, where it was infamously transformed by Ellis into The Authority — sequenced the genes for the violent spectacle and lucrative payday of blockbusters like director Joss Whedon’s The Avengers.

“The Authority was out not just to preserve our way of life, but to actively change it,” Whedon says in the exclusive clip below from Meaney’s excellent Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts, which makes its DVD debut at The Image Revolution’s Comic-Con panel. “The lengths to which [it] would go were pretty extraordinary, the damage [it] might do would be extraordinary, but it was all in the service of a vision.”

Then the comic influenced every other writer for the next decade, says Morrison in the same clip. “Everyone thought, ‘I could apply that to Iron Man or to Thor or to the Justice League,'” he says.

That significant cultural and economic evolution wouldn’t have happened without Image Comics, whose 20th anniversary panel at Comic-Con kicks off Sunday afternoon with Kirkman, Liefeld, Silvestri and others in attendance. Two decades later, it’s an industry force whose warnings about ownership and creativity are more powerful than ever.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.